Thea Astley, Reaching Tin River (1990)
I used to think that Thea Astley (1925–2004) was in every way the opposite of her older brother, Phillip, with whom I lived for six memorable years. But then she showed me the room in which she did her writing. It was not like the rest of her house.
~
In my twenties, I was part of a small group of Jesuits who, on our holidays, used to visit Thea and her husband, Jack, in their home high on the range that overlooked the Shoalhaven River, a few hours south of Sydney by car. Thea loved the audience. Jack sat quietly to one side, smoking, while Thea occupied centre stage, also smoking. She was witty and sarcastic, and her voice could cut through leather. For ages, she would hold forth, asking the most intimate questions in a demanding voice then saying, ‘You don’t have to answer that,’ then answering the question herself. It was great fun. Jack was never required to say much.
The only thing Thea didn’t allow us to ask about was her own work, a topic that was strictly off limits. She was brazen about many things but reserved about the inner life of her novels. One time, I was poking around among the old books on the shelves of the Catholic parish in Toowong, an inner suburb of Brisbane. I stumbled across a copy of Thea Astley’s first novel, Girl with a Monkey, published in 1958 when Thea was thirty-three. Like many debut novels, it draws on Astley’s personal experience, especially as a schoolteacher in regional Queensland, a stifling existence from which she had been desperate to escape. Astley’s extraordinary career spanned more than forty years and teachers often surface in her novels, nearly always as people who have been excluded from the life they really want to be living. Astley began writing partly to free herself from the arid existence of the classroom. Girl with a Monkey was completed while her only child was a baby.
The copy I had come across was not just any copy. It was the one she had inscribed and dedicated to her parents: Cecil and Eileen, an odd couple. Bear in mind that Astley won Australia’s most prestigious writing prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, on no fewer than four occasions; nobody has won it more often. Astley blazed a trail for all writers but especially for women: she was gifted at describing the invisible prisons in which people get locked up. So the book I had in my hands had a significant place in Australian cultural history. I returned it to her with a mild query about it ending up in such a strange place.
‘I have no idea how it got there,’ replied Thea.
It was difficult to get past that guard.
Thea was far more kind than she wanted people to know. But she pretended she couldn’t remember much about her books, although she could quote reviews, especially bad ones, by heart. I can’t remember a meeting with her over the years of our friendship in which she didn’t mention that Patrick White, Australia’s Nobel laureate and, I think, her unspoken rival, had said to somebody or other that Thea told a decent story. I am not sure if she was pleased or displeased by such paltry praise. She did, however, want to know that we had read her books and when one of us, Ed, confessed that he had not, she was unimpressed in a self-mocking kind of way.
‘What are the books like?’ asked Ed on the way home.
They are as sharp and trenchant and cutting as she was. But they are also wise, compassionate and lean. Not a wasted word. Thea once told me that she treated her stories like anchovy paste. She spread them as much as possible to cover every corner of the toast. This is the kind of pasty metaphor that she would never have tolerated in her own novels but she meant that she didn’t waste material.
~
Phillip, Thea’s only sibling, was quietly spoken and so gentle it was sometimes difficult even to feel his presence in a room. In the Jesuit world of big personalities, he demanded very little. But he had hands made of steel and could peel an orange faster than anyone else in history, tearing at the rind and then the pith as if the fruit needed to be punished. We lived together in a community and, much as I enjoyed and admired Thea, I came to love Phillip. I have been close to only two saints and he was one of them. He was extremely modest, entering a shower cubicle fully clothed and emerging the same way.
Like Thea, Phillip was no stranger to mental anguish and his suffering had brought him to a kind of mellowness that, as a self-important young windbag, I did not understand. His life had not been easy. He had been sent to teach primary-school children, who ate him alive. Indeed, at his funeral in 1997, one of the priests introduced himself to Thea and started regaling her with funny stories about what a disaster he had been in the classroom.
‘Well, father,’ she said in a voice that could have made the statues blush, ‘at least he did his best.’
Later, he went to England to pursue a calling to the contemplative life at Ampleforth Abbey as a Benedictine monk, an order with a wonderful ability to combine beauty and asceticism. Things didn’t work out and, returning to Australia, he was not sure where he fitted in. He fell into a deep hole and, I believe, hardly said a word for five years, not even, I suspect, to God. On several occasions, he was hospitalised for poor mental health. A friend wrote: ‘He had lost confidence in himself; he had lost his sense of belonging.’ This was the dark night of his soul.
Phillip came back to life thanks to friendship and faith, the two areas in which he found love. That is a long and beautiful story. Music played a big part in it. On cold winter afternoons, you could hear him playing the organ on his own in the chapel. Often, when he played, he took off his fine-rimmed spectacles and turned off his hearing aid. He was entering his cave to see if God had left him any morsel. He was a braver man than I ever could be.
There are many priests in Thea’s novels. Most of them are portraits of cruelty and complacency, with the possible exception of Father Dempsey in The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (1996). None of her priests are the least bit like Phillip. Yet the room in which she wrote was very much like a room in which you could imagine Phillip finding peace. There was a piano against the wall. On a small table there was a typewriter. That was it. It was bare and ascetic but, if you knew Thea, it had everything you needed to make something beautiful out of all the petty antagonisms of life. Her two keyboards were closely related.
~
As he was dying, Phillip leaned back on his pillow at the hospice and looked at the ceiling.
‘I am a homosexual,’ he said loudly. It was strange to hear this quiet man yelling. He sounded like he was ready to rip the skin off an orange. He didn’t care who heard: he was free.
~
Phillip was lightened by innocence; Thea was burdened by guilt.
After Phillip’s funeral, Thea asked if I could take her to see Helen Daniel, then the editor of Australian Book Review. Helen’s partner had just died and Thea wanted to extend her sympathy in person. Yet the first thing she said to Helen when we arrived unannounced at the office was: ‘You feel like you did it, don’t you?’
Helen was also a colossal smoker. She used to run a secondhand bookshop where she sat behind the counter with a book in one hand and a cigarette in the other. They were both on their second cigarette by the time Helen could find an answer.
‘Yes,’ she said.
Later, Helen told how much she’d been helped in that moment by Thea’s dark candour. Thea seemed to be implying that however much Helen had looked after her partner, she would still feel inadequate. This was the closest I saw Thea to sharing Phillip’s understanding of the dark night. But Thea’s language tended to be one of guilt: You feel like you did it.
In our last conversation, Thea told me that she had been a terrible wife, a terrible mother, a terrible person. None of this was true.
‘But you have been a terrible pessimist,’ I said.
~
Of all Thea’s books, I keep returning to Reaching Tin River, a work of beauty and depth set mostly in Astley’s heartland of regional Queensland. It is less autobiographical than works such as It’s Raining in Mango (1987), which deal with the history of Astley’s forebears. But the journey of the central character, Belle, is one in which Astley shows her own heart more than anywhere else. The result is both poignant and witheringly funny. Belle is the result of a brief marriage between her mother, Bonnie, a drummer, and Huck, a trumpet player who returns to America. Later, tired of life as a teacher and then a librarian, Belle will go to America looking for Huck, a journey that takes her to a trailer park in search of faint clues. She marries Seb, a cruel and callous individual. Little by little, Belle sheds the uniform she has been expected to wear, in order to pursue a vision of her own. Again and again, she says she is looking for a centre, toying with images from Euclid to make light of the untidy geometry of life. This phrase is a refrain throughout the story: it occurs on many occasions in numerous guises. The blind and gutsy search for a centre is what the dark night of the soul is all about.
Thea and Phillip both worked hard on the task.